American Oil and Gas Reporter - April 2015 - 122

SpecialReport: Performance Drilling
out has to take that into consideration as
well. You also have to consider anti-collision practices because the wells are
drilled so close together in a field with
thousands of vertical wells."
Hall says modern rigs that can walk
themselves to the next well site have improved efficiency greatly and cut the
time needed to drill multiple wells.

Pioneer Natural Resources Company, whose DL Hutt pad is shown here, employs batch
drilling in its Southern Wolfcamp operations in the Permian Basin. Executive Vice President Joey Hall says that reduces downtime by enabling the company to drill the surface and intermediate sections of multiple wells with one fluid system before returning
to drill the lateral sections with a different mud system.

Although Pioneer has drilled both
four- and six-well pads in the Wolfcamp
and Eagle Ford, Hall says he believes three
is the optimal number. "The efficiency flattens when you put more than three wells
on a pad," he observes. "It extends the
'spud to placed-on-production' time. If a
well takes 30 days to drill and complete,
a fourth well just means 30 more days before the first well can contribute to cash
flow."
Pioneer uses zipper fracs, but Hall says
it is not always fracturing stage one in
each of the three wells and then moving
to stage two. Pioneer has experimented
with variations of traditional zipper fracs
by lagging stimulation of stages on one
of three wells to see whether that enhances
the fracture network and improves performance.

pect."
Preplanning is important also for designing the surface layout of a multiplewell pad, according to Hall.
"You have to know what your artificial
lift needs will be," he points out. "If you
are using pumping units, you don't want
the wellheads too close. You also want to
consider the workover scenarios. If you
have stacked pays, odds are you will drill
more wells in the future, so your pad lay-

Need To Plan
Hall emphasizes that there is not a single recipe. Pioneer has almost 800,000
acres in the Permian Basin, and in some
cases it is drilling stacked pays in multiple zones, which makes the process that
much more complicated.
"In some cases, we have four or five
pay zones in the same acreage," Hall relates. "We can predict from modeling how
wells in the same zone will react. But when
you are drilling in multiple zones, it gets
more complex. Predicting how a well will
react and how multiple laterals will react
to each other is challenging. We still have
a long way to go in understanding that as-

122 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

Paradigm Shift
Drilling multiple wells off the same pad
may seem like a paradigm shift from traditional single-well sites employed by the
industry for decades, but Kurtis Hoffman
takes it one step further.
"We don't talk primarily about the
number of wellheads per pad," says Hoffman, general manager of completions
for CONSOL Energy, which is drilling
Marcellus and Utica shale horizontal
wells in a pair of joint ventures with Noble Energy and the Hess Corporation in
Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
"We talk about how many lateral feet we
have per pad. If we drill four to six wells
per pad that average 8,000-foot laterals, we
are talking about 32,000-40,000 lateral feet
per pad. We even consider construction
cost per foot of lateral. Not everyone does
that, but we talk only in terms of the number of lateral feet per pad."
He says lots of economies of scale can
be realized when drilling multiple wells,
which allows CONSOL to split contain-

Pioneer Natural Resources employs zipper fractures on its Permian Basin and Eagle
Ford Shale wells, such as this Three Sisters pad in the Eagle Ford. But Executive Vice
President Joey Hall says the company has experimented with variations of traditional
zipper fracs by lagging stimulations of stages on one well to see whether that enhances
the fracture network and improves performance.



American Oil and Gas Reporter - April 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Oil and Gas Reporter - April 2015

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